Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Virtualization allows the abstraction of hardware resources and the pooling of these resources to support multiple virtual machines. For example, through virtualization, virtual machines with different operating systems may be run on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine is generally provisioned with virtual resources that provide similar functions as the physical hardware of a physical machine, such as central processing unit (CPU), memory and network resources to run an operating system and different applications.
In a virtualized computing environment, the utilization of virtual appliances represents a new way of deploying software applications. For developers and users, the benefits of virtual appliances include a reduction in development and distribution costs, accelerated time to market and the ability to leverage capabilities of different virtualization platforms. However, the building of virtual appliances may be a slow and complex process.